Is Miami Hot?

When I left Miami almost 20 years ago, there were no peacocks on the streets. There might have been peacocks in lush lawns on “Star Island”, the artificial key in Biscayne Bay that Jennifer Lopez calls home. And there were certainly peahens frolicking with their lesser aviary kin in the “eco-adventure park” called Parrot Jungle where I’d go on school field trips (now named Jungle Island). But I would have never imagined seeing a couple dozen peafowl perched on my neighbour’s hedges in Coconut Grove or holding up traffic because a subsection of the clan decided to roost in the middle of LeJeune Road. So, unsurprisingly, it was hard for me to believe my eyes when, on a trip to Miami back in October, I saw herds of peacocks and their hens hanging out in parks I frequented in a neighbourhood in which I once lived.

The peacock population of Miami has become a topic of much discussion. Residents are not pleased. The birds have been called an infestation, a nuisance. Because they are reproducing at alarming rates, they have become a “critical mass”, and Miami Dade County and the Village of Pinecrest have been forced to implement population control measures (namely snipping the males). Peacocks are beautiful, sure, but they’re also aggressive and territorial. Apparently, god forbid, they damage property: when they see their reflection on a car door, they pick and peck at it, leaving cars scratched and owners unhappy. And, on top of that, they’re loud.

To me, the peafowl infestation of Miami is, most of all, a delectable development. I am tickled by the fact the residents of the city are nervously clucking about, trying to find a way to castrate these vibrantly feathered birds. Frankly, it’s so fantastic a development from a literary perspective that I’m afraid I won’t be able to do it justice in this text. Nevertheless, I will try. Let me know how I do.

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Miami. Let me start by stating the obvious: there is no more absurd city. And this comes from someone who has spent a formative part of her life in the Arab Gulf. I have long shied away from accepting my close ties with this zip code. For most of my life, I’ve clung to my Mexican passport like a life raft—I’m cool, I’m exotic, I’m normal, I promise. Unfortunately, however, that’s not the whole truth. Between the ages of 5 and 11, I called Miami’s tropical monsoon climate home. I lived through Hurricane Katrina and Wilma, eating Spaghetti O’s cooked over a gas grill in the garden after the power went out. My childhood dog, Bruno, was a Cuban beagle who barked with a cool, brass, conservative undertone. And Emily, our German Shorthaired pointer, was undoubtedly boricua. When I first moved back to Mexico, my Spanish stunk of Florida: I said “keike” for cake instead of pastel, and I said “parquear” to explain how one puts a car away rather than “estacionar”. Like Pitbull, I might be both Ms Worldwide and Ms 305.

Because of Miami’s “reputation”, when I moved to Mexico at age 11, but more importantly when I went to college in Abu Dhabi, I learned to shed any trace of my Floridian upbringing, except, of course, my Green Card and my shiny, peppy American accent. It happened gradually. In sixth grade, when I first arrived back in the country where I was born, I swam seamlessly between the Mexicans of my British international school and the U.S. American ex-patriates, typically the children of U.S. diplomats. Initially, while I sat through the national curriculum with my compatriots during school hours, I hung out with the Americans after school. Soon, however, I found my footing in my motherland and exclusively spent time with the Mexicans, who wanted little to do with the Americans. Years later, when I arrived at university, one of my classmates teased me for spending so much time in “the self-proclaimed capital of Latin America”. I began saying the M-word less and less. At one point, the fact that I “grew up” in Miami felt like a colourful, tropical fever dream.

After leaving in 2006, I returned to Miami only sporadically and stopped visiting almost entirely at age 16. The first time I returned to Miami as an “adult” was in 2021, for a reunion with my elementary school classmates (as reunions go, most people had exactly the same faces as their eleven-year-old selves but significantly less hair). Last year, my parents decided to split their time between Mexico City and Miami, so I need to learn to make my peace with the bizarre city. I’ll be visiting much more often.

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Last weekend, I flew down to Miami to help my mum set up her new house in the heart of Coral Gables. It’s makes me uncomfortable to admit just how beautiful the neighbourhood is: the trees are decorated with moss and orchids, homes are thoughtfully illuminated and yards well-trimmed, and, most importantly, Banyans hang over the streets on every corner, lending the otherwise entirely residential neighbourhood a touch of magic. This was quite the contrast from my very first encounter with Miami on this trip: the airport bathroom. After disembarking my flight, I was met with the distinctive smell of tobacco in a sharply lit bathroom where someone, in some stall, was playing Celia Cruz on their shaky cell phone speaker. I was in MIA’s newest terminal.

What struck me most about Miami on this trip is just how desperately it wants to be stereotypically Hot. Everything is gold—a store that advertised “neutral tones for winter” was stocked exclusively with gold-sequined dresses. Everything is branded: it is impossible to walk more than fifty metres without encountering a belt, a handbag, a sandal, or a tracksuit brandished with a logo larger than my hand. The Miami resident has an commitment to fragrance topped only by the Gulf. Unlike New York City, where I can’t remember the last time I saw a stiletto for sale, in Miami, heels are everywhere, to a fault; Macy’s at Dadeland Mall even sells those hideous heeled sneaker boot things that were trendy for all of four seconds in 2012. And, unsurprisingly for Florida, which is unashamedly a state-sized retirement home, age places no limits on the city’s quest toward Hotness: elderly men walk around with travel-sized oxygen tanks tucked into a leather fanny pack (p.s., is there a new name for this item now that this is trendy again? Please someone save me).

In an attempt to educate myself about this city and perhaps begin to understand some things about my upbringing, I have been reading Joan Didion’s Miami, which I picked up at the most beautiful (and perhaps only?) bookstore in Coconut Grove, where it was proudly displayed on a central table. The book is less a portrait of a city and more an examination of its people and their allegiances. Didion focuses on the Cuban population in Miami and their strained relationship not only with their “white-haired Anglo” neighbours but also with the “white-haired Anglos” of Washington DC, with whom they have engaged in crippling cycles of promises and betrayals around U.S. intervention, not only in Cuba but also in Central and South America. Once I got over my (snarky) surprise that Joan Didion studied Miami in so much detail, Miami has helped me understand what has historically made this city, underneath it all, so profoundly unattractive.

Miami is not Hot, despite its best attempts, because it is a city made up of people who are simply no longer relevant but really wish they were. You see, it’s a population, overwhelmingly, of exiles: while the Cubans are historically and famously so, I’d venture to extend this term to a broader population of Latin Americans and Anglos alike. Many became Miami residents after fleeing their home countries in search of a better economic, political, and even environmental climate; this goes for families who left Argentina, Nicaragua, and Mexico, as well as the elderly couples who set their sights on Florida after a life in New York, Chicago and Boston. Since they’ve arrived in their new home, rather than settle in and be present, they look back across the bay, the country or Gulf to their home regions, and they passionately express their agreements and disagreements with their home country’s current president or leader, they plot coups, they pour money into political movements, and they even go as far as begging the CIA for support to organize paramilitary groups. All to remain a part of a life they left behind.

It’s a pity, really. Miami is, truly, stunning. The in-land residential neighbourhoods like Coral Gables and Coconut Grove are breathtaking examples of sophisticated wildness. Miami Beach, if you manage to ignore the coiffed blondes walking poodles with manicured paws (varnished with pink nail polish, I kid you not), isn’t the most beautiful beach in the world, but it’s perfectly pleasant, and its crisp white sands contrast nicely with turquoise skies and waters. The pastel-coloured art deco buildings scattered around Collins and downtown Miami are fun and playful, and the coral-rock buildings like the Miami Dade Public Library pictured below are the perfect balance between alien, natural, and elegant. But rather than enjoy all this, the residents are fussy and spend too much time tanning.

Let me be a smidge more generous. Didion’s book was published in 1987, and while some of her descriptions of life in Miami were painfully apt (early on in the book, she writes about “a room full of perfectly groomed mangoes”), I’d like to think that some things have changed. Since October, I’ve added up no more than 96 hours in the city, so I’m not yet an expert. Some things about Miami are better now than when I lived there. At the airport, I saw t-shirts with what seems like a new city logo, “ M I AM I “, suggesting something more like a pride for the local. I’ve also gotten wind that there’s a more vibrant art movement in the city, and when I’ve mentioned my parents’ move to acquaintances, they remark on my luck for having somewhere to stay next time Art Basel is in town. That said, some things remain painfully the same. After I picked up my book, I sat in an Italian restaurant on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach and started perusing its pages. The waiter, pouring a hearty glass of tap water, said I was probably the only person in the city who reads. And, of course, there are those sad, other things, like the raucous conservatism that has, in fact, banned many books (and ways of being and loving). sigh

Ultimately, it’s hard not to draw parallels between Miami’s residents and their peacock neighbours: beautiful, loud, inconvenient, vacuous, and alarmingly self-destructive. Maybe they deserve one another.

‘Til next time

Actually. I’ve been banging my head against my keyboard trying to write a newsletter dispatch about whether or not the biographical genre is Hot. I’ve had this in the drafts folder for months, dear readers, months. It’s driving me mad. Does anyone out there want to take an early look at it and tell me what’s wrong with it? xx